Open thread, Apr. 18 - Apr. 24, 2016

Trying to think of what's not on this list:

• The EA forum sometimes has insightful posts, mostly EA news

• Givewell and Open Philanthropy Project blogs

• http://nickbostrom.com

• /r/slatestarcodex, /r/LessWrong, /r/HPMoR, /r/smartgiving, /r/effectivealtruism, /r/rational

• Thing of Things (Ozy's blog)

• Topher's blog URL is now http://topherhallquist.wordpress.com

• http://thefutureprimaeval.net is a group blog by a few ex-LWers I believe

• You could probably dig up more by looking through the blogrolls of the blogs you've already identified. For example, Scott Aaronson considers himself part of the rationalist blogosphere and is listed on the SlateStarCodex sidebar.

• Andrew Critch's blog is great

• PredictionBook, Omnilibrium

• Of course there are lots of Facebook groups (especially EA-related Facebook groups) and Facebook personalities, notably Eliezer

• Somewhere I got the impression that HBD Chick and Sarah Perry of Ribbonfarm were LWers at some point. There's also the "post-rationalist" community which includes sites like Melting Asphalt.

• Scott's community map

Many of these update infrequently, making it bothersome to check all of them. I'll bet it wouldn't be very hard to create a single site that lets you see what's new across the entire diaspora (including LW) by combining all these RSS feeds in to something like http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/ Could be a fun webdev project. Register a domain for it and put it on your resume.

This seems very useful. Thank you for posting it.

Out of all of the blogs, which ones do you prioritize in reading first? It seems like there are far too many to always read all of them.

Possibly similar to absence seizures or complex partial seizures. This person should really be checking with a neurologist rather than a psychology undergrad.

The best fitting symptoms are those of automatism), a kind of epileptyc seizure where the person lose consciousness and starts to do automatic behaviour.
As with anything associated with epilepsy, he should treat the symptoms very seriously and promptly consult a neurologist.

From a hypnosis perspective I would say that he falls in somnambulistic trance state. I however don't know people regularly falling into such a state 2-3 times a day for no reason.

How well does he sleep? It might be interesting to get a Smartwatch with sensors to see whether his vital signs change in those episodes.

To note i have had people tell me it's a Fugue state. I don't think so mainly because Fugue state usually lasts anywhere from a hour to a day. Maybe this might be a short Fugue state but i doubt it.

I think I remember in the Sequences dude is talking about how he's on the phone and someone is talking about chest pains and the emts won't take them. He's like "huh, that's odd", and comes up with reasons. Turns out its just a fake.

Seems like that's what's going on here. The odds that someone has this incredibly bizarre illness, yet has managed to function to the point that he's a student (never got puppetted off the road, or into traffic, etc.), yet confides in you, and his problems don't match up to stuff that happens to lots of people (No one else goes crazy like this, it's weird enough that it'd be a known thing)... OR, a human is lying.

update: asked someone else; they say likely epilepsy.

worth considering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome - for uncontrollable compulsion to do a thing.

I imagine a condition causing these symptoms would be tested by putting the person under observation for a day or a few days. It might be possible to get them to attend a sleep lab, if the events happen while they are asleep too then that might be a key to diagnosing it as easy/fast as possible. Otherwise does the person know of anything that causes the events more or less?

Also the general rule for diagnosing/treating conditions - is it negatively impacting their life? If not then leave it alone.

if:

1. they are curious and really want to know, get further testing done.
2. they are in danger - i.e. find themselves unable to drive a car safely due to strange events
3. their life is impacted greatly (i.e. cannot drive a car)

If it's not doing anything bad; leave it.

If it's an early symptom of a condition it might help them to be diagnosed, I don't know why but it could also be like Schizophrenia.

Welcome.

As for your friend, I would very tentatively go with some sort of epilepsy.

I don't like how people are talking about Gleb here where everybody involved knows that he reads it without much respect for that. I understand that it is necessary for this community to solve this out and in a way this community is good that using reflection and neutral point of view but still I'm not too happy how it is done. I'd wish somebody would say:

Hi Gleb, if you are reading this, I'm sorry that we didn't find a better way. We really want to solve this in a way that is OK for you and us.

As for the tension that Gleb brings (and actually some other newbies, including me too): I think this is a natural process for a community that is developing after some initial hype. People taking the seed elsewhere; the origin not having the same close-knit focus anymore. I'm OK with this and I think adjusting to it and making the best out of it is better than fighting (which has its own questionable trade-offs). So Gleb is just one example. I have seen this very process in the c2 forum almost exactly the same way (there I also arrived after the hype; c2 is defunct now; make of it what you want...).

I like Gleb's intention and I partly recognize myself. How do you expect somebody with such a skill-set to act and learn? I also tried things. I mean there is a whole CFAR topic about it: CoZE. I hope nobody expects that CoZE always comes with pleasant socially adequate and successful results. I did quite some blunders not that different what some people here feel uncomfortable with tried by Gleb. But he does. And he learns and adjusts. Fast. Maybe too fast because that creates incomplete adjustments that probably add to the uneasy impression he makes. But who knows how non-LW people in his circle perceive him? Who knows what feedback he gets or doesn't get?

I welcome Gleb and I hope he continues to improve because I see lots of potential. Maybe more impact than many other people here. Make the best out of it.

Why do we need all this drama? Why can't the people who don't like Gleb just downvote or ignore him?

I'm the person who encouraged OrphanWilde to post that PM. I'm quite grateful that he did because this has recast the situation.

I don't know about anyone else, but my impression of Gleb is that he's annoying but mostly harmless. Mostly harmless because that early project of trying to promote rationality by turning it into an applause light was definitely a bad idea.

The PM has caused me to do some updating which I hope I will generalize. I started out with an assumption that there might be something wrong with Gleb for attracting that sort of animus, and something wrong with me for not seeing what was wrong with Gleb.

I think OrphanWilde's approach has made LW seem like a place where people can be attacked for unclear reasons, and as moderator, I probably should have moved much earlier to discourage this.

It literally never occurred to me that the animus was (or had shifted to) something strategic, and it wasn't trolling exactly but it was still not an accurate presentation of OrphanWilde's beliefs.

I haven't seen a clear explanation from anyone (though I may have missed some comments) of what they think Gleb misunderstands.

Here's the comment which OW's PM was an answer to. I don't have a copy of what I PM'd to OW, but it was tactful.It took me a while to get from "What the fucking fuck?" to "Thank you for the information". I believe that you can't force a mind. Shaming people isn't a reliable way of getting the behavior you want from them. Neither is anything else, but a light touch has fewer side effects.

>Honestly I think he is just an incredibly socially clueless person who wants to be liked by a community he respects, and everything he's doing is to prove his worthiness to Less Wrong. Unfortunately his... tactics aren't particularly well-received, being painfully transparent.

> encourage him to modify his behavior

has modified his behaviors somewhat

would encourage him to continue to modify further.

but then turns around and transgresses again in some other fashion.

Perhaps he is lacking some fundamental understanding that if he were given we could trust him to no longer transgress and instead improve. I haven't the faintest idea what; or how to find it. Nor do I have much energy left (after already trying many times) for trying down this pathway (or any) on his behalf.

My reaction to Gleb's "emulating a sociopath" is essentially this. :(

my role is that of the villain, providing an obstacle which requires him to overcome personal faults and which plays conveniently to his preexisting strengths

This is a strategy that I've only seen working in comic books.

At least this should show the danger of taking cues about interpersonal behavior from fiction.

I think his empathy deficits are more autistic than psychopathic.

Just an idea: generate a random long password, store it on a USB memory stick, then put the memory stick in your cellar. That would be an inconvenience that doesn't involve another person (so you can also use it when your girlfriend is away). Just remember that after logging into FB, you first return the memory stick to the cellar, and only then start reading.

As of the last survey, 87% of LWers were male and 75% are 31 or younger, and I've read that men tend to be more owlish than women and young people tend to be more owlish than old people.

Such an open question on FB is bound to show selection effects. Better to do a straight poll:

I prefer to go to sleep [pollid:1134]

I prefer to wake up [pollid:1135]

I have to go to sleep [pollid:1136]

I have to wake [pollid:1137]

Because they spend their nights reading LW?

Lots of late night computer screen time? That blue light is messing with sleep cycles. I used to think I'm a night owl myself but can adjust my sleep schedule at will if I just mind the lighting. These days I wake up at 2-4am.

Curiously all males in my family used to be late sleepers when young but effortlessly switched to rising early when their careers kicked off. They didn't have computers back then so maybe it was their social lives keeping them up late.

Three thoughts.

First, evaluate your broader activities, and see where you have the right balance of big projects and small ones. If you're unsatisfied with the balance, do more big projects.

Second, explore collaborations with others. You can often go further together with others, and it would help address the bipolar swings through others providing more stability during down swings. Of course, make sure the "other" in this case is pretty stable.

Third, create a trigger action plan of noticing when you're about to sacrifice projects. Stop and evaluate whether you're doing the right move for your long-term goals.

If you just deleted it it might still be in your trash can, ready to be brought back.

Maybe because big projects mean big risk since 1) lots of effort might lead nowhere and 2) you don't have time to do other small risk small reward projects. Maybe your level of risk aversion fluctuates?

After the survey I've become confused about what it means for HBD to be false. Should any difference between two separated populations be completely environmental? I believe it's an antiprediction to think it's not. I would bet that the "genetic potential" for any complex trait will be slightly different on average between different populations even if we are talking about two neighboring cities. Even if they started out as copies of each other just a few generations ago.

This looks to me like you have a fairly good view of what it would look like for HBD to be false. That is, there would be no meaningful biological diversity among humans, and the idea of people with different levels of intelligence would be as outlandish as the idea of people with different number of eyes. I mean, we don't expect that to vary between two neighboring cities, and even though there are some people who have something other than five fingers per hand, that's also something we would expect to only barely vary between cities, and so on.

After the survey I've become confused about what it means for HBD to be false.

I don't think the survey asks that question. Just like it doesn't ask whether feminism or social justice are false. Those are cultural movements that can't simply be understood by boiling issues down to one sentence.

I also believe that the differences are small and are mostly irrelevant to any real world problem.

The HBD crowd doesn't.

I don't know too much about HBD, but I would guess that the most important trait for them is intelligence. And maybe aggressivity, impulse control, ability to cooperate with non-relatives, and this kind of necessary-for-civilization things. (You can ignore other traits, such as eye color or lactose tolerance, they don't make a big difference in modern society. So you'll buy a different box of milk, big deal.)

Mathematically speaking, if you could measure something to million decimal places, it is very unlikely that the averages for different populations would be exactly the same. But in real life, a difference of 1 IQ point does not make a huge difference. So the question is whether the differences are large enough to matter in real life.

Humanity split from our common origin about 10000 years ago. It seems like enough time to make significant changes; for example, mere 1 IQ point per century could accumulate to a difference of dozens of IQ points below distant populations. On the other hand, humans were already shaped by evolution millenia before they split, so maybe most possibilities of cheaply gaining yet another IQ point were already exhausted before we split. I don't feel certain enough to make a hypothesis either way.

So we should solve this question empirically, and then we get into problems -- the old research was unreliable, and the new one is not done for political reasons. So I still feel like the answer could go either way.

strike to the heart of the question, not to defeat it. I plan to write it still. finding time appears to be difficult.

Yeah, what a hoot it has been watching this whole debacle slowly unfold! Someone should really write a long retrospective on the E-Cat controversy as a case-study in applying rationality to assess claims.

My priors about Andrea Rossi's claims were informed by things such as:

1. He has been convicted of fraud before. (Strongly negative factor)
2. The idea of this type of cold fusion has been deemed by most scientists to be far-fetched. (Weakly negative factor. Nobody has claimed that physics is a solved domain, and I'm always open to new ideas...)

From there, I updated on the following evidence:

1. Rossi received apparent lukewarm endorsement from several professional scientists. (Weakly positive factor. Still didn't mean a whole lot.)
2. Rossi dragged his feet on doing a clear, transparent, independently-conducted calorimetric test of his device—something that many people were willing to do for him, and which is not rocket science to perform. (Strongly negative factor—strongly pattern-matches with a fraudster).
3. Rossi claimed to have received independent contracts for licensing his device. First Defkalion in Greece, then Industrial Heat. Rossi also made various claims about NASA and Texas Instruments being involved. When investigated, the claims about the reputable organizations being involved turned out to be exaggerations, and the other partners were either of unknown reputation (Defkalion) that quickly disappeared, or had close ties to Rossi himself. Still no independent validation. (Strongly negative factor).

And now we arrive at the point where even Industrial Heat is breaking ties with Rossi. What a fun show!

coding a binary search, which is a little nontrivial because you have to think carefully to avoid off-by-one errors

Half-open ranges are your friend :-)

Reminds me professional opinions that avoiding trigger warnings exacerbates pathology whereas exposure diminishes is. Haslam is from my university, too, and I've chatted to him! I tend to think in black and white, and catastrophise when I think of the past. Maybe I wasn't actually 'abused'.. just overly sensitive :P I mean there was god, and there was bad.

It interesting given that we frequently see complaints that LW should reuse more concepts from the outside instead of making up it's own concepts.

Concept creep automatically comes with reusing concepts.

I've been parsing this as: You were incorrect in your prior understanding of what components make up X. ... Does this match up to how you parse his statements?

Nope. I parse them in terms of incentives. When Hanson says "X isn't about what you thought. X is about status", I understand it as "People are primarily motivated to do X not because of X's intrinsic rewards, but because doing X will give them status points".

Status, as far as I can tell, has a motte-and-bailey problem.

The bailey is that status is a complex, technically defined concept, specifically involving primate hierarchies, extremely sensitive to context.

The motte is that status is exactly what it sounds like - just your standing in the eyes of other people.

(Or am I using the terms backwards? Let me know.)

You could say that I actually brush my teeth in the morning because I would lose status if I didn't due to having visibly stained teeth and bad breath, etc., and my reasons really don't have anything to do with preventing cavities and avoiding dental suffering. This is somewhere between facile and banal, depending on how you're reading "status".

At best, Hanson's work forces you to consider the social context of certain actions and policies.

Hanson often says something along the lines of: "X isn't about what you thought. X is about status." ,,,

He likes to use this as a catchphrase, but the actual content of his statements is more like: "Here's how status most likely affects X, and here's some puzzling facts about X that are easily explained once we involve status." Of course the importance of status dynamics may vary quite a bit depending on what X is and perhaps other things, so your question doesn't really have a single answer.

It's about mental models. It says that the standard mental model isn't good at explaining reality. On the other hand the status model is better at explaining reality and therefore a better model to use. It's not the claim that the status model is perfect at predicting. Models don't need to be perfect at predicting to be useful.

In general Hanson tries to focus on expressing concepts clearly and arguing for them instead of making them complex by introducing all sorts of caviats.

I think it reads better if you say "about signalling" rather than "about status". The relationship to actual status evaulations is murky and complicated. The motivations to affiliate with high-status groups and ideas are much more straightforward.

Personally, I tend to parse them as "Look how cynical and worldly-wise I am, how able I am to see through people's pretences to their ugly true motivations. Aren't I clever and edgy?".

I am aware that this is not very charitable of me.

In more charitable mood, I interpret these statements roughly as Lumifer does: Hanson is making claims about why (deep enough down) people do what they do.

There's a Chrome extension called Crackbook that does exactly this.

People who want to use facebook less often might benefit from increasing page-loading time on facebook by 1 second.

My Firefox often slows down horribly when opening Facebook, and I don't see myself procrastinating less. It makes me angry when it happens, but I stay and wait until the page is loaded. (Or go drink some water while it is loading, etc.)

Could it perhaps be a difference between random slowing down and predictable slowing down?

I'm looking for an approach that's made-up numbers all the way down.

You may want to rephrase that :-)

Once you have that, there's an exact answer to the optimal risk/reward tradeoff

No, I don't think so. For example, let's say your utility = log(wealth). That's a monotonous transformation, so if you want to maximize utility you just maximize your wealth. That doesn't answer the question of what is the appropriate risk/reward trade-off because you haven't even started talking about risk yet. And if you just want to maximize expected wealth you are open to being Pascal-mugged.

Banned.

How convincing a pitch happens to be depends a lot on the standards of the person who hears the pitch.

Secret to (real world) pitching success. Name the profits; Name the cost (what you are asking for); then name the "how", who, why etc.

Top down, investors want to know $ first.

YMMV

I appreciate your efforts, but I need to point out that I am strongly opposed to this sort of idea, and anything else that explicitly turns LW into group therapy.

Introducing niceness into discussions on LW is not the same as changing the topic of discussions away from where it belongs, which is epistemic and instrumental rationality.

The discussion of how to use expressing gratitude to improve mental health, and how effective it is for LW folk, definitely belongs to LW. However creating an object-level gratitude thread feels like a step in the wrong direction (or at least, it seems sensible to keep it as a sub-thread in the open thread).

#LessWrongMoreNice

do it.

Oy, the gratitude thread is getting some deterioration into discussions of Intentional Insights. Perhaps I shouldn't be the one to post it next time, as some people have strong negative triggering about the outreach I do.

My main goal is not to get karma/brownie points for the success of this project, but to have the project succeed and help make LW a nicer place.

So what are thoughts about whether I should be the one to post it next time?

What are the special rules involved that are mentioned in the thread? Are they the same as the Happiness Thread?